Monday, June 30, 2014

A near-riot marked the first game of the Cincinnati-Chicago series [in Chicago yesterday], which the Cubs won by a score of 10 to 7. In the visitors’ sixth inning Moran fouled down the third base line. Hoblitzell protested to Eason, the umpire, that the hit was fair and was ordered to the clubhouse. Charley Herzog ran into the argument and was ordered to join Hoblitzell.

A few moments later one of the players took Moran’s bat and threw it toward the players’ bench. The aim was wide and the bat landed in the field boxes. Immediately spectators swarmed out upon the field, but they were calmed by attendants and players.

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The Game of 6/27/84 was a tense, high-scoring, 11-inning game played at an iconic stadium in which the eventual league MVP played a key role.

No, I didn't just go back and write about the Sandberg Game because I didn't get to on June 23. But this makes a nice replacement.

But good as that game was, the Game of 6/28/84 was even better. It also lasted 11 innings, and narrowly passes this game to rank as the best 11-inning game in my database at present. The bases were always loaded in the late innings, and the teams kept trading the lead, and the home team had potential winning runs thrown out at the plate in back-to-back innings.

And you could argue that none of that was the coolest part, because the game included an individual achievement that (if the commenter on a B-R blog post I found is to be believed) had only happened 3 times previously in baseball history. Yeah, this game is among my very favorite discoveries in the GotD series.

The Game of 6/27/14 was the 14th career start for one of the pitchers involved, and he was the veteran of the pitching matchup. It was eventually decided by a player who came off the bench in the eighth inning and still managed to achieve the second-highest WPA of his career to date, despite the fact that WPA does not properly credit him for a CRAZY baserunning play.

The Game of 6/28/14 also has a highly impressive baserunning play in a key spot, and then lasted 9 more innings after that, with the game being tied in the bottom of the ninth and the home team loading the bases when down a run in extras. It's one of the best of the year so far.

That's a fun line for Hamilton. One thing I mentioned during one of the many Doom & Gloom threads before his call-up was that he's going to benefit enormously by the change in offensive levels--while a guy with his offensive skill-set had almost no chance of playing regularly in the Sillyball era, with less offense across the board, a guy with limited power and OBP still has a chance to make it.

So, yeah, Billy Hamilton is hitting .282/.313/.404, which is in "solid Major League regular" territory.

In 1999, Arizona's Tony Womack hit .277/.332/.370 with 72 steals....pretty similar numbers to Hamilton's (again, it's about as a good a year as you can get for a player with little power or OBP skills), but yet, in that environment, Womack was just barely playing at replacement level; he had a 77 OPS+ and 0.5 WAR.

The Game of 6/29/84 was actually probably better than either of the other two games from '84 listed above. The starting pitchers were a future Hall of Famer and a future four-time top-four Cy Young finisher, so naturally, the two lineups unleashed an avalanche of hits, runs, and homers that was both one of the most hitting-dominated games of the year and one of the best overall.

The Game of 6/29/14 featured a nice ending to the first half of what's looking like a career year for one of its participants. It also features half of a recently-completed swap of struggling closers; shockingly, the struggling closer continues to struggle for his new team.

What's going on with Primer recently? Soccer, Basketball and political threads get thousands of comments, but there's precious little discussion about baseball, at least as compared to past years. It's even during the season!

How do you submit stories? I'm going to go looking for interesting baseball-related things to post to the newsblog.

The key thing is that he's playing above-average defense (by Rfield +9). He's hitting for a bit more power than I expected and has gotten the Ks .... well, not exactly under control but better than league-average. The baserunning was always likely to at least nearly balance the hitting so he was gonna be about average with average defense. If his defense really is solidly above-average, he'll be a plus player. If he can add walks, he'll have some wiggle room on the hitting.

To temper enthusiasm, Pierre was worth 3.1 WAR at 23 with just -4 in Rbat. He had two more above-average seasons in his career but was overall a below-average (but useful) player. Hamilton has show more power than Pierre ever did which is good. So far this year, he's been Lofton without the walks.